The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication: A Guide to Internal Communication, Public Relations, Marketing, and Leadership

Workers as Mere Units of Cost

For the most part, the history of human capital leadership both before and during the Industrial Revolution was a sad affair. It was largely characterized by a fondness for authoritarian leadership that was aided and abetted by bureaucratic management structures. The underlying, but unspoken, premise was that workers were untrustworthy, childlike creatures who needed more than anything to be parented—rewarded when they conformed to the rules and punished when they did not.

Psychologist and business critic Harry Levinson (1973) characterized this timeworn arrangement as “The Great Jackass Fallacy.” His simple observation: if we are so enamored with carrot-and-stick reward systems, we need to reflect on what we typically ...